


four times phil coulson got his nails painted

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Phil Coulson, Coulson centric, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Hotels, Kissing, Male-Female Friendship, Mommy Issues, Mother-Son Relationship, Nail Polish, SHIELD Academy, at some point Coulson compares his mom to Daisy but it's nothing icky don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 08:56:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7428331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...and three women who painted them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	four times phil coulson got his nails painted

**one.**

The kid watches his mom get ready in the afternoon, it’s the first time she’s been out with friends since the father died.

“The babysitter will be here in fifteen minutes,” his mother tells him.

Phil nods from the doorframe.

He’d normally go back to his room and play or read, but for some reason this afternoon he lingers, watching his mother apply nail polish on her fingers.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Painting my nails.”

“Can I see?” the boy asks.

She gestures for him to get closer and he walks slowly and sits cross-legged on his parents’ bed. The room is silent. The house is a lot more silent these months. He noticed soon that her mom didn’t cry, just like he didn’t either. 

“It’s pretty,” he says, looking at his mom’s nails. A soft pink color. She normally never paints her nails during weekdays - it’s amazing what a kid notices - and when she does it to go out with some friends or with her husband when he was alive she prefers these relaxing pastel colors.

Phil watches her enthralled; there’s something soothing about the precision of her movements. Or maybe he just likes spending time in here with her. Being with his mom only makes his dad’s absence more real and sadder but it’s come to the point where he can’t keep hiding in his room.

His fascination for what she’s doing gives his mom some encouragement.

“Do you want me to paint yours?” the woman asks tentatively, eager for any kind of connection with her son right now. He was always a quiet child, but cheerful. She wants to respect his mourning, but she misses their former closeness. It’s not like he is talking to his friends or teachers about it, anyway.

He seems to think about it, very seriously. At ten he is very serious.

“Yes, I’d like that,” he declares, offering his hands to his mother.

She feels herself smiling more broadly than she has in months. She crawls on the bed, not caring that her dress gets wrinkled.

Phil seems to enjoy the apparent slowness of the process, the ritual side of it. The strict sequence of events. His mother cleans his nails first, with a little hard sponge and she files the corners until they are smooth. Phil’s favorite part is the she explains everything that she does - he likes explanations, he doesn’t like it when things happen and he doesn’t know why.

“You’ll want to apply two layers of paint,” his mom says. 

“Like with Lola,” he comments.

She stops for a moment, the name of her husband’s car an unexpected gust of cold air in her lungs.

“Yes, like with Lola,” she says, trying to sound cheerful.

Phil nods as he listens to her instructions, like he is memorizing them to do this himself some day.

“Do you like it?” his mother asks.

He holds up his left hand in front of him. There’s not much of a difference, but the cute pink on his nails looks kind of cool to him. He nods again.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” the woman says, running her hand through the boy’s hair for a moment. He knows that he doesn’t like people getting fussy and touching him ever since his dad died.

“We should remember to clean this off before you go back to school on Monday,” she says, making a mental note.

Phil makes a confused face.

“Why? _I like it_.”

His mother gives him a sympathetic smile.

“Some kids might pick on you,” she tells him, gently.

“Why?” Phil asks. He looks at his painted nails again. “It’s nice.”

“Some kids don’t like when boys paint their nails,” his mom explains.

Phil frowns. “Well, that’s pretty stupid.”

His mother chuckles and hugs him spontaneously. He hasn’t quite let himself be hugged since his father’s funeral. It’s nice, he thinks. He has missed it.

“Yes, it is pretty stupid,” she says.

 

**two.**

He is tapping his feet on the floor of the kitchen and his mother makes a grimace.

“Phillip…” she says withouts tearing her gaze away from his hand.

“Sorry. I’m just… I’m late.”

He hates being late.

“You’re the one who stayed behind in baseball practice,” she reminds him.

Not exactly his fault, he wants to tell her, but that would mean telling her that he had to clean the lockers as punishment for a poor performance and he doesn’t want to disappoint her. Truth is he is not that interested in baseball anymore these days, but he doesn’t know how to tell his mom this either. So he doesn’t. She probably knows he has been spending more and more time with this older crew, killing time in record shops and second-hand stores.

Without noticing he starts tapping his foot again.

“You could do this yourself,” his mom says.

“But you’re quicker,” Phil argues. “You have more experience.”

She shakes her head. “You’re so cheeky,” she sighs, finishing the last nail and blowing air on them.

Once the pitch black polish finishes drying Phil gets up from the kitchen table and grabs his worn out leather jacket (well, it was already eight years old when he bought it) and gets ready to say farewell for the night, his mom having never bothered to set an official curfew. 

Phil flashes her a smug smile. “I’m cheeky but cute.”

His mom takes his face in her hands.

“Very cute,” she agrees, kissing his cheek. “Go have fun.”

 

**three.**

Just because he has to keep his arm in a sling for a couple of weeks it doesn’t mean he can’t look handsome when he goes out during the one night a month the Academy lets him have off. His unfortunate training accident won’t stand in the way of fashion.

He needs help with it, though, so he asks one of the junior agents living in the same quarters as him, one of the ones he finds easier to get along with.

“You don’t worry the rest of your team will kick the shit out of you when they see this?” she asks, as she applies bright blue paint on Phil’s nail, leaning out of a chair as he sits on the bed in his room.

“Hartley, it’s the 80s, if my team can’t handle seeing me with my nails painted on a weekend I obviously made the wrong choice joining SHIELD.”

The agent rolls her eyes. “Ever the optimist. I’m pretty sure Agent Garrett would kick your teeth in for this.”

It was a pretty bold move for a first year student to be criticizing her seniors but Izzy wasn’t one to bite her tongue. She’s only half right.

“John? He’s not so bad.”

John would, however, make some pretty unfunny remarks about it. Not that Phil is planning to let his colleague see him like this. But Izzy is cool. They have some things in common, if they are not exactly friends. She wouldn’t judge.

Izzy makes a noncommittal noise at his defense of Agent Garrett.

“Anyway I’m not hanging out with people from the Academy tonight, no way, it’s my night off, I see enough of you little pests already,” he explains. “Tonight it’s just the locals.”

“That bar with the cheap cocktails and the cute waitress?” Izzy guesses.

He nods. This town doesn’t have that much of an offer for entertainment. He feels tempted to tell Izzy he could ask that girl her number for her but Izzy would probably just punch him in the face.

More importantly her nail-polishing technique leaves a lot to be desired.

He tries talking her through it, like his mom used to do with him, but for someone who exhibits scarily accurate aim with a knife Izzy is pretty clumsy with the brush, leaving lumps of paint or going over the edge of the nail. He feels the temptation to grab the bottle of polish and do it himself, if it wasn’t for his injured wrist.

“Have you ever done this before?” he complains. Which, he shouldn’t, she’s doing him a favor after all.

She shrugs and looks embarrassed and he kind of forgot she’s a few years younger than him and he’s being too pushy.

“I’m not sure if you noticed, Agent Coulson, but I’m not exactly a nail polish kind of girl,” Hartley says, stating the obvious.

“Well, _I am_ ,” Phil replies, gesturing with his head, “so very careful.”

 

**four.**

“It’s so boring in here, and we don’t even have proper tv channels.”

Daisy is an impatient person, she doesn’t like downtime, it doesn’t relax her. It wasn’t her idea to get stuck in some cheap motel in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a storm. Coulson doesn’t like it either, but at least they’ve finished their mission here, and well, there are part of having to spend the day in a hotel with nothing to do Coulson definitely enjoys.

He gestures between them, at the messy bedsheets.

“We could… again…”

She slaps his shoulder gently.

“Settle down, charm school. Girls have refractory periods as well,” Daisy replies. Then frowns. “Well, I do, anyway.”

He is slightly appalled at himself for having brought it up. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to press.”

“You didn’t,” Daisy assures him.

She smiles at him as if to let him know it’s okay. They are both sitting on the king sized bed in their underwear and t-shirts, listening to the rain, which is infinitely more entertaining than surfing through the local tv stations again.

“What did you do as a kid for fun on rainy days?” she asks him, resting her hands on his bare knees.

Coulson gets a very vivid flashback: dirty Boston weather, a Sunday afternoon, the homework already done - always finished it early - and his mother’s records playing. He must have been fifteen or so.

“What?” Daisy asks, reading something on his face.

“I liked having my nails painted,” he admits, because if he can’t tell these things to Daisy then what’s the point.

Ten minutes later they have the whole thing organized. Daisy only brought dark brown polish in her bag and Coulson admits it’s not quite his color - Daisy’s face of delight when he says this, silently interrogating him on his preferences, the face she makes is worth the whole thing and Coulson is suddenly happy the rain has them stuck here.

Daisy’s technique is good, but she is too practical about it. She is quick, painting his nails with dexterity more than with respect to the ritual.

But he likes this a lot. They are just killing time but Daisy painting his nails… he feels taken care of, in a way. Most of their relationship so far has been about Coulson wanting to take care of Daisy, not because she needs him to, just because he wants to. Things like this - how carefully Daisy is holding his hand, her fingers skimming against his palm turned downwards - make him realize how much it feels like Daisy is also looking after him. They look after each other.

“My mom used to do this for me,” he tells her. He hasn’t told anyone.

“I guess I’m not the only one with Mommy issues,” Daisy teases him gently. It’s rare for her to mention Jiaying so Coulson doesn’t feel offended about his mother getting compared to a murderer. “Why did you stop painting your nails? I’ve never seen you wear nail polish before.”

He makes an ambiguous noise at the back of his throat. He hasn’t really thought about it, not seriously, but Daisy has this knack for making him unbury truth about himself like this.

“Once I started going out on mission for SHIELD… let’s say it didn’t look exactly professional.”

Daisy looks at him with a strange, soft gaze, like she is sensing something more.

“I think it’s great your mom did this for you.”

Coulson shrugs.

“It was just me and her, I didn’t have anyone else,” he explains. Then, getting at the real reason why he stopped wearing nail polish, he adds: “When she died, that was it. I didn’t have anyone.”

Daisy looks down at his hands and applies herself to the task with a look of extreme concentration and a cute frown.

“Now you have me,” she says. She never looks directly at him whenever she says something that might sound too mushy or romantic or something she is afraid Coulson might reject in her.

He tries to reply just as casually.

“Yeah, I’ve got you now,” he agrees.

He feels Daisy freeze and smile a shy smile, then go on with the nail painting, slower than before, more careful and less practical. More like the ritual Coulson remembers and was missing without knowing.

In the end she holds his hands in hers, a bit awkwardly. But she seems satisfied with the results of her work.

“You look good.”

“You think?”

She nods, letting how of his hands.

“You look sexy,” she says, twisting her fingers into his t-shirt, bringing their mouths together. And okay, Coulson is happy the rain has them stuck here for other reasons, too.

“Careful, you’re going to mess the polish,” he warns her, playful.

“Your priorities are messed up.”

She laughs into his mouth, Coulson gently pulling her into the kiss, one careful hand on her back - careful not to ruin the nail polish, careful because it’s Daisy. He gets one of those frequent waves of warmth and sentimentalism just being around her; not unlike how he remembers it felt like hanging out with his mother, which he probably shouldn’t mention to Daisy. But that soothing contentment of knowing you’re among family, in the presence of the closest person to you.

“Perhaps I should paint some daisies on my nails next time,” he replies, wanting some irresponsible gesture to declare his love.

“Imagine that,” Daisy mutters, almost curious if he’d follow through.

They haven’t told anyone they are in a relationship yet (Mack probably knows what’s up, Coulson guesses) and that would be a pretty spectacular and silly way of “coming out”. For a moment he fantasizes with it, while Daisy brushes her nose against the stubble that’s already forming on his jaw.

“Look, the rain has stopped,” she says, looking over his shoulders.

He turns his head.

“Pity,” he says.

Daisy rests her legs across his lap, snuggling up against his chest.

“Well, we could always pretend it hasn’t stopped raining…” she suggests. “I could always… paint your toes too.”

Sounds like the nicest plan in the world right now.

Daisy kisses his neck, slipping her hand under his t-shirt.

Maybe the _second_ nicest plan.


End file.
